Endangered languages

Associate Professor Claire Bowern is in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University. Today she talks about why some languages become endangered and why we should care about this. Her main area of work are endangered Australian Aboriginal languages.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Languages – we each have one or two or three, and they are good for your brain. They keep it tuned and enrich your culture. Languages also tell us who we are and how we think. So it’s more important than it seems that we preserve as many as we can. The point is how.

In some places in our region there are hundreds of different languages, up in the north of Australia for example and in Papua New Guinea, more than in Europe. So it’s going to be a challenge for Dr Claire Bowern, who is a professor at Yale University in the United States, a challenge that’s sometimes hard to fathom.

Claire Bowern: The 22nd June this year was a red letter day for endangered languages. Google released endangered-languages.com a website which catalogues more than 3000 or roughly half of the world’s currently spoken languages. The site is the result of collaboration between academics, language speakers and communities and Google. Languages are now being lost at a rate faster than ever before. Most of this diversity is unrecorded and will disappear without trace unless we act now. I am one of the endangered language sites 12 regional directors; our job is to curate the content of the site for a particular part of the world. I am in charge of the Australian portion of the site and so my talk today takes examples primarily from Australia.

As a catalogue the site is second to none and I say that even though I am a bit biased of course. No other site houses this much information on language endangerment and at this scale. There are of course local language catalogues such as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies catalogue called austlang, but none of these catalogues has the global coverage of endangeredlanguages.com. Furthermore the site is an unparalleled opportunity to make use of crowd sourcing to get accurate information about speaker numbers and language use.

Each language page has a place to upload samples. The language page for Navajo for example contains sample sound files so you can hear what the language sounds like. Users can upload their own materials, correct information on the site, or offer their own perspective on the language situation on their community. With each regional director responsible for hundreds of languages there is need for those on the ground to contribute their own sense of what is happening to their languages. The knowledge sharing portion of the site contains podcasts, vodcasts and samples from linguists and community members. The Coushatta tribe of Louisiana for example give details about their language project and I have uploaded some short lectures which are aimed at language speakers recording their own languages.

The site is also important as a focal point for language activists. Here is a graphic illustration of what we as humans stand to lose when we lose linguistic diversity. Here’s a site which tries to address the problem on a global scale. You might think of it as putting a name and a face on the somewhat abstract idea of language shift. While half the world’s languages are now at risk the situation is even worse in Australia, where every single one of Australia’s indigenous languages makes it onto the catalogue.

Cataloguing the world’s languages is no easy task however. The project staff had to make many difficult decisions. Perhaps the trickiest decision was what counts as endangered. We could have used absolute numbers of speakers and said that any language below say 500,000 speakers is threatened, below 100,000 is severely endangered and below 10,000 is critically endangered. That would work in some areas but in Australia the largest languages have only about 6,000 speakers. Aboriginal languages like Djambarrpuyngu, Arrernte, Murriny-Patha and Pitjantjatjara have more speakers now than they probably ever have had before. Aboriginal children are growing up with these languages and they are known by just about everyone in their communities. So in that respect they are considerably healthier than some other languages with many more speakers. Scots Gaelic for example has more speakers, between 20,000 and 30,000 in fact but very few children are learning that language. The situation is even starker in some African countries. In Tanzania for example there are languages with several million speakers which are not used by anyone under the age of 20. Younger people instead use the national language, Swahili. It is therefore only a matter of time before those languages are gone. We should remember that there isn’t necessarily safety in numbers when it comes to language shift.

We ended up using four different criteria in defining language endangerment. Speaker numbers was one but that was not the only one. We also looked at whether children were learning the language, what the speaker number trends were and the domains of language use. In my previous example Djambarrpuyngu would score higher than Gaelic because lots of children are learning Djambarrpuyngu whereas few children are learning Gaelic. Speaker trends refer to how quickly the community is shifting to another language. Djambarrpuyngu speakers in Northeast Arnhem Land for example are often multilingual, speaking not only Djambarrpuyngu and English but other Aboriginal languages as well. And this has been the case for some time for generations in fact. But Djambarrpuyngu is not safe since the language receives very little support outside the community and it’s not used much outside of Arnhem Land.

When working with the Australian portion of the catalogue some additional concerns came up that didn’t apply so much elsewhere in the world. One was the question of what to do with languages which are sleeping, no longer actively used, or have no or very few confirmed speakers. Excluding such languages would have seriously misrepresented Australia’s linguistic landscape. The late Ivy Booth for example did not speak her language fluently (Gooreng Gooreng), because she was taken away from her family and put in a dormitory at the age of 6 where she was punished for speaking her language. There are no known speakers of Wadikali or Pirlatapa because almost all were shot in the Mindiri massacre of the late 1800s. Punthamara people no longer speak their language because around 1930 a cattle truck turned up in western Queensland and carted all the women and children off to Cherbourg mission about 750 kms away and they were forbidden from speaking anything but English there. So if this site is about putting names and faces to language shift why should these languages not have a place too, just because the causes of the shift occurred 80 years ago in my grandparents’ time rather than right now?

Some Australian languages are being reclaimed. They never wholly fell out of use with families passing down words and phrases, if not the full language. Now some of these languages are being used in school programs and community contexts such as greetings and welcomes to country and language revival efforts are well underway. The Mobile Language Team for example co-ordinates information about Aboriginal languages in South Australia and the Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative provides language support in coastal New South Wales. These organisations support languages which have a presence in their communities, even though it’s difficult to gauge the exact number of speakers and how fluent they might be.

Finally, sometimes we find that languages that we thought had gone still in fact have speakers. Professor Peter Austin from SOAS wrote on the Endangered Languages and Cultures blog in 2010 about how Diyari, a language of South Australia, had been presumed to be extinct the last speaker after all had died in 1994 as far as we knew. The language continues to be spoken however by at least one Diyari family. So we shouldn’t be too quick to nail down the coffin lids on languages and I really wanted to take that into account when producing the catalogue.

Endangered-languages.com has been pitched as a tool to save languages, to preserve them and to catalogue them. You might have seen headlines along the themes of “Google fights for endangered languages” or “Google aims to preserve endangered languages”. As a linguist I found these headlines rather misleading after all just because we now have some awareness of how many languages are under threat it doesn’t mean that our awareness will translate into action. It’s easy to commission surveys, inquiries and reports. It’s harder to act on the recommendations of those reports.

The Australian government for example has been quite good at commissioning surveys about language use in education and conducting inquiries, but it has been quite slow to act on the findings at least in relation to language. For example none of the 2007 Ampe Akelyernemane “Little Children are Sacred” recommendations relating to language have been enacted despite five years of the intervention. That report also noted that its language and culture findings were largely identical to those in the 2004-2005 report on Indigenous Language and Culture in Northern Territory Schools and few, if any, of those findings had been enacted by then either.

We must remember that putting an endangerment index next to a language name will not stop the shift away from smaller languages. It won’t stop the social processes that lead to language endangerment in the first place. No one can save a language except if speakers continue to speak it. Unless language communities want to continue using their languages nothing any linguist, any government, or any school program can do to make those languages continue. Irish Gaelic for example has been in decline for years despite substantial educational and governmental support. Conversely there are many inspiring stories of Aboriginal people who have passed on their languages despite many barriers.

There is a big gap between the type of material encouraged on the endangered-languages.com site and the amount of material typically generated in language documentation, making a lasting record of a language takes years, a lifetime. No documentation is ever complete. It’s not just a case of uploading a couple of clips to youtube. There are no simple languages in the world; all languages have thousands of words. Some words are easy to translate, while other might be very specialised, or have a lot of different sentences and so may take a lot of work to describe. Languages are complex codes and without the key to that code they are undecipherable. In my desk at work there is a copy of a cassette, it’s the only recording of a language from western Queensland made in the 1960s. It’s a 20 minute monologue recorded from an Aboriginal man who was the last speaker of that language. There’s no indication as to the content and no translation. As it is we know that this language is closely related to its neighbours, so all is not lost here but the neighbouring languages are also quite poorly documented so there is no guarantee we’ll ever be able to fully decipher this narrative.

It can be difficult for someone brought up as a native speaker of English to appreciate what the loss of linguistic diversity might mean for the world. There’s the allure of a common language of course. “Why do we need all these languages?” people ask, “What’s wrong with English?” My favourite argument along these lines is one that goes something like “well we could prevent wars if we had fewer languages. If we had a common language we would understand each other better.” I strongly suspect that if we had a common language we would just be able to insult each other more effectively. A common language after all didn’t prevent the Rwandan genocide, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, or the Hundred Years War. In fact the Hundred Years War involved two common languages between the two countries – French and Latin so they were doubly unlucky there.

The loss of linguistic diversity to science is just as much of an issue for at least two reasons. Languages let us find out about the past and they show us how speakers conceptualise the world today.

In looking at the past we can use information about current patterns in language to make inferences about languages in prehistory and about their populations. In this way modern languages are rather like fossils. We can work out when language groups diverged, where they came from and who they were in contact with. The endangerment of half the world’s languages is, from this point of view, rather like seeing half the fossil record disappear from the world. The record in both cases isn’t perfect, so we need as much information as we can get. Language endangerment on this scale is therefore really a disaster for language prehistory.

Languages also give us a view on human cognition and variation. Some parts of language are universal. For example all pretty much all languages seem to have a way to distinguish nouns from verbs, but other areas of language are extremely variable. Giving directions is one area. Languages like English, Russian, Japanese and Spanish tend to use left and right, that is directions based on the point of view of the speaker. But some other languages use north and south, so speakers might talk about their northern hand rather than their left hand. English speakers usually only use these sorts of absolute directions north and south and so on with large fixed objects, so we might talk about the island to the north, or the easternmost mountain, we don’t use them for body parts. Some languages use several direction systems depending on what speakers are referring to. The Kimberley language Gooniyandi is one of those languages. They have four of five different systems. But while direction systems show quite a lot of variation they aren’t limitless. For example no language to my knowledge uses into the sun as a direction, even though plenty of languages use east or west, or upstream or downstream, uphill or downhill, or upwind or downwind to give directions.

Let’s hope that the endangered languages catalogue will help us target endangered language documentation efforts and language maintenance programs. Otherwise it will unfortunately just be a clear monument to how we lost in a couple of generations thousands of monuments to human creativity that took thousands of years to build up.

Robyn Williams: Wouldn’t that be tragic? Claire Bowern is a professor at Yale University in the United States.

Next week: more extinctions, this time of birds when Sue Taylor talks about her magnificent new book: John Gould’s Extinct & Endangered Birds of Australia.

Guests

Associate Professor Claire Bowern

Department of LinguisticsYale University

Further Information

Credits

Comments (5)

angie :

25 Nov 2012 10:48:38am

I was enjoying listening and hopefully learning something until, the professor came out with " It would be difficult for native English speakers to appreciate the loss of languages "... I was shocked a professor didn't realize the English language was almost extinct its self, when yet another invasion happened in the UK French ! But English was kept alive by peasants who didn't read in remote areas of the UK. many other languages in the UK diluted into dialects then strong accents, over time. These dialects and accents would not still be spoken with a pride and a sense of identity, had it not been a common language spoken to unite a country again. May be there should be a common Aborigional language we all should learn ?

David Cohan :

But I her claim that a single language would NOT facilitate a more peaceful world is just plain silly, and I recommend she drops from future talks.

Cynicism aside, the more we can interact, the better. Travel is said to broaden the mind, and most would agree. The world is increasingly faced with problems like global warming, which can only be solved at the international level. It is increasingly clear that politicians will not act unless there is a global coalition of civil society to force them.

Claire Bowern :

29 Nov 2012 9:03:46am

Thank you for your comments.

I am, of course, aware of the Norman conquest, but it never came close to endangering English. There were between 1 and 3 million speakers of English in Britain at the time, most of whom would not have come into regular contact with French speakers. French replaced English at court and in the upper classes, but never in more rural areas or among the lower classes (remember also that the England of 1066 had few large towns). In comparison, the Aboriginal population of Australia in 1788 was likely less than 200,000, with about 350 languages rather than 1. The technological disparities and colonisation experiences were also rather different.

Rod :

04 Dec 2012 6:34:45pm

Ockham's Razor has often published the opposing viewpoint, and I think this is a good topic for that. So, Robyn, can you find us a presenter who will give the counter argument: that 4,000 to 6,000 languages is a waste of human effort, and we should be trying to get rid of them all, and converge on just one language. The benefits to humanity would be vast.

Rosie :

01 Mar 2013 3:01:06am

I'm unfortunately no longer surprised when people want ONE LANGUAGE OR ALL THE LANGUAGES. An extremely important fact to remember is that humans have the capability to communicate in *multiple* languages. There is no theoretical reason why there can't be one global language, because people could also still speak their own languages. I'm sure the people who advocate the 'one global language' position would also be vehemently opposed to abolishing national boundaries and states. Of course, the practical reason why there isn't one language can be found in the failure of Esperanto, the failure of any one language to ultimately dominate despite efforts (Spain, France, I'm looking at you) to do so.

And to say that language ability is a waste is to demonstrate a tremendous ignorance of the role of language in both the social and personal development of individuals. Language is not simply a means to communicate (of course, that is its primary aim) but it is evidence of identity, an intangible record of history and experience of peoples and a deep well of knowledge, particularly in places like Australia, where knowledge was never written.

A good example my mum uses is the Dutch phrase that means 'to eat with long teeth' (i.e. eat something you don't like because you have to). There's no English equivalent, at least not such an idiom, and it takes a fair amount of explaining to communicate what is a common idea to speakers of that language.

Language is inextricably linked with culture, and to suggest that language is a waste or should be allowed to go undocumented is the same as saying the same about any other cultural practices. Just because language is intangible unless it's written, does not mean it is worthless.